


John Watson, Housekeeper

by leakh



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, John is practically their housekeeper, but it's cute, in the real show i mean, john gets some appreciation, mycroft notices things, sherlock's such a brat, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 14:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leakh/pseuds/leakh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one in which John is their housekeeper and Sherlock is himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	John Watson, Housekeeper

_“John!”_

 Dr. John Watson, formerly of Her Majesty’s Army, sighed heavily before levering himself out of the armchair where he’d been composing a blog post about one of their latest case. There’d been such a string of cases that he had a backlog to get through. He set his laptop on what was hopefully a stable stacked tower of books and resisted the surprisingly strong urge to bellow a _“What?”_ back.

John decidedly did not rush as he made his way upstairs to the bathroom. He didn’t bother to knock before entering the already open door.

“Yes, Sherlock?”

“Hand me my towel.” Sherlock shoved the shower door back a bit and waved a grabby hand impatiently.

John eyed Sherlock’s hand. Then he looked to the towel bars, where there were two towels, as there always were; John’s generic blue one he’d gotten at IKEA, and Sherlock’s impossibly soft and fluffy white one, likely brand-name and therefore horribly expensive.

Huffing, John grabbed Sherlock’s towel and shoved it into his hand.

“You couldn’t walk yourself a few steps to get it yourself?”

Of course, Sherlock didn’t dignify this with any sort of reply except to withdraw his hand, towel clutched in it, into the still running shower. John gave a resigned roll of his eyes and headed back downstairs to finish his blog post. He wanted to finish it up before he had to go into the clinic for whatever odd hours he could get.

Another hour at it and his laborious efforts were rewarded. “The Woman with a Twisted Lip” gained twenty hits the minute after he posted it.

John puttered contently around the kitchen, made tea for two, one cup of which Sherlock snatched up distractedly as he passed through in a bathrobe, looking through a stack of pages and dropping “Useless!” ones, leaving discarded sheets on the floor.

Sherlock would never be arsed to pick up anything unless it pertained to a case, so John was the one who raised his eyes to the ceiling in a silent plea for patience before collecting the scattered pages and set them on the counter. John drank his tea, made two omelettes, ate his and saved the other in the refrigerator in case Sherlock got hungry, and fetched the mail to look over after he got home, setting it on top of Sherlock’s papers.

Then he left for work, telling Sherlock, who ignored him, that he’d be back for dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

John was at Tesco’s after only three hours at the clinic—they’d been a bit slow, actually, and it was kind of them to give him any hours at all today—picking up milk, bread, and something for dinner, when Sherlock texted him.

_Mycroft sent you a cheque._

Puzzled, John parked his trolley out of the way in the deli section and slowly typed out a reply.

_Why?_

Sherlock’s response came almost immediately.

_Come home now._

John frowned at his phone. Mycroft hadn’t offered him a bribe since that first time they met. Surely, if a cheque had come, it would be for Sherlock, not John?

John sent, _At Tescos. Be home in 15 min._

John was at the chip-and-pin machine, paying for the milk, bread, and the makings for pasta, when it occurred to him that perhaps Mycroft sent him the cheque because John, unlike Sherlock, would actually accept it, instead of tearing it into confetti before throwing it up into the air and leaving it for John to clean up. Actually, a bit of help in the money department wouldn’t be amiss.

On John’s walk home he daydreamed of all they could do with a fat cheque from Mycroft—get that cleaner he’d been eyeing, as it’d be perfect for disinfecting the kitchen of Sherlock’s experiments, and oh, he could afford his favorite brand of tea again!

John was grinning just a bit when he unlocked the door of 221B. Sherlock ambushed him as soon as he got in the door.

“John!” Sherlock brandished the cheque at him.

John snatched it out of Sherlock’s hand. A personal cheque on embossed paper, with a fancy watermark printed on it, and an equally fancy-looking hand declaring that “£1566” now belong to “John Hamish Watson.” The only other thing it said was “For services rendered” on the bottom.

“What’s this, then?” John asked. “It’s not for you?”

Sherlock scoffed loudly. “It has your name on it, John, how could it be for me?”

John cut Sherlock off before he can debase his intelligence further. “No, I mean, I thought your brother might be sending it to me because you’d refuse to take it.”

“Hah! Mycroft knows better than that,” Sherlock dismissed. “But I could use some spending money for my experiments now that you’re taking his bribes.”

John gaped at him. Spluttered. Set the groceries on the counter before he dropped them, and took a deep breath. “Of course I haven’t been taking his bribes; how could you think that?!”

“Oh.” Sherlock looked faintly puzzled for all of two seconds before he smirked. “Oh.”

Sherlock, who was still in a bathrobe, by the by, whirled on his heel and stalked back to his fluttering stack of paper, which seemed to have doubled in height in the last three and a half hours. John, to his utter dismay, noted in his peripherals that most of the floor also seemed to be covered in discarded pages.

“Don’t just ‘oh’ me, Sherlock, bloody tell me!” Being accused of bribery and knowing he was going to have to pick up all those pages was certainly not putting him in the best of moods.

Sherlock picked a sheet off the stack, scanned it, and tossed it to the floor. “Mycroft knows you won’t take a bribe; I assumed you had told him you would reconsider it, as your hours in the clinic are growing shorter and so he was sending you money, but that isn’t the case. Mycroft likely has had some kind of surveillance in place—something visual at the very least—because he can see what you’re doing in the flat. What you do in the flat other than the sleeping and eating and showering everyone does is: update your blog, clean and cook, and most notably, clean up after me. Mycroft,” and here Sherlock sneers the name, “is the eldest, and feels obligated to look in after me when it is neither needed nor necessary, and he has done so this time, as well. In this instance, he observed your role in the flat and is ‘compensating’ you in a way he feels that I can’t or won’t.”

John digested this speech in silence for a few seconds. Then he ventured, “He’s…paying me? For something he thinks I’m doing…for you?” Then John scowled. “I’m not doing anything than what a friend would usually do!”

Sherlock smirked again, fingering the next page in his stack. “In layman’s terms, John, Mycroft is paying you because in all aspects of the word, you appear to be my housekeeper.”

John froze, jaw hanging open. “I…what?” John shook his head fiercely, then refocused and glared at Sherlock. “Are you taking the piss?”

Sherlock raised an elegant, posh eyebrow. “Have you ever known me to ‘take the piss’?” He let another page flutter to the floor.

John clenched his jaw furiously. He crumpled up the cheque, but stuffed it into his pocket—just in case. Spinning around, he unpacked the groceries, slamming doors and drawers as he did so, pointedly refused to pick up any of the paper lying on the floor, and stomped up to his bedroom. There, he sat on his bed and reviewed breathing exercise until he no longer felt like stomping back downstairs and giving Sherlock a black eye—although he still wanted quite strongly, to find Mycroft and shove the cheque up his arse using the prat’s umbrella to help it along.

John vowed that he wasn’t doing Sherlock any more favors. No more picking up after him, no more going to the dry cleaners to pick up his clothes for him, and certainly no more making him tea or meals or tromping all the way upstairs just to hand him something he could have gotten if he took two steps.

No more. Certainly not.

 

 

 

 

 

It took fourteen hours—and only that long because John refused to go back down for the rest of that night—for John to break his vow. Mostly because he almost broke a leg slipping on the discarded paper lying around the flat. Sherlock, the bastard, didn’t have any problems at all, and seemed to have great fun sliding around on the layer of pages covering the floor.

John picked up after Sherlock. It took two hours, but the floor was visible again, and Sherlock, for once, was dozing on the couch sulkily after John shouted at him for throwing more paper on the floor for sliding purposes.

John resigned himself to it.

He took the crumpled cheque out of his pocket and flattened it, staring at was what apparently his salary. Before he put it carefully in his wallet, he texted Mycroft.

_I demand a raise._

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, it's practically canon. Also posted on LJ.


End file.
